How long until offenders start using the easily accessible encryption to avoid losing their connections? This will effectively make it harder for rights holders who have legitimate claims to go after offenders.

Whenever you pull the pendulum in one direction, it always swings back in the other one.

How about jail for incorrect expenses and graft 3 times. That's more than a mistake, that's fraud. Yet politicians get away with this shit way too often, regardless of country. Can anyone name a politician that was even *fired* for it, let alone charged? They're all allowed to resign, step down, or otherwise voluntarily leave office. I think that's wrong. Most jobs, you're caught pulling that stuff, you're escorted out of the building.

The consequences will be simple, and depends on how fast the Telecom pack legislation passes in Europe

1) The Conseil Constitutionnel gets mandated to have a look at the law, and the Telecom pack is already there. It will throw the HADOEPI law back to the parliament as incompatible with the EU legislation, and hence invalid. And it's all much ado about nothing.

2) The telecom pack gets delayed, and the law proceeds without major challenge (the selfsame Conseil might also invalidate the law as being incompatible with key elements of the french constitution itself, go to step 1). The telecom goes in force, and France gets X years to put his legislation back into conformance (i.e. geld the HADOEPI's extra-judicial powers) or face punitive damages.

3) The Telecom pack gets brute forced AGAINST the wishes of the european parliament, which will simply demonstrate to all europeans that EU isn't a democratic institution, and needs bigger reforms than the last treaty, and the french presidential lobby is happy, and can wield a big ban stick to cover their abnormal business model based on luxury-levels professional content duplication (in an era where anyone can duplicate any content for less than an euro cent, paying any service to create a copy of a content for you is an economic aberration)

Okay so you lost internet. How many minutes does it take you to figure out that letters full of 16gb microSD cards actually have higher bandwidth than your connection? Quite abysmal ping though, but there's public acess points for the latency critical applications.

Is there a dispute resolution mechanism if I happen to be a Frenchman who's been falsely accused three times (I'm not French, and I haven't been accused of filesharing, I'm just curious).

You could take it to the courts, but AFAIK there's no built-in tribunal for disputes. You might have trouble once you're there, since the law gives authority to cut your connection after three accusations by the industry, not three proven cases of infringement. If, for instance, you were to write publicly about the issue in a critical tone, the industry could say, "I don't like you" three times fast and you'd be disconnected with no clear means of recourse. They don't even have to tell you you've been accused - the warning notes are optional.

Encryption has some nasty surprises: you can easily maintain an I-didn't-do-it or I-didn't-know-it level of innocence. This is going to give P2P encryption techniques as well as anonymisation networks a HUGE boost. A LOT of french programmers are going to be quite pissed off, and rightly so.

Oh man, do I want to do a rant against the French right now. But it'll be allright, just another felix culpa. Die gedänken sind frei, plagiarism is built into nature and the French politicians are swimming upstream; they'll tire sooner or later. Unfortunately this will mean that some families will start using iTunes stores and such, and no doubt the Big Four will take and twist those statistics into an I-Told-You-So.

Don't use it for copyright infringement, that would be illegal. But use it to make everything you do on the Internet much harder to detect. If they are going to use our openness against us, we must stop being open.

It's a little hard to set up a darknet right now, but it will get better if we all work together. Now go forth and start the hard work of remaining free.

As near as I can tell, using only a car, I can go 6,121 km without needing to bring a passport. Seeing as it is before June I could probably make it to the south of Mexico which would stretch it a fair bit further but either way seeing as the distance I could travel in a cell is measured in feet I don't think it matters much. Why don't you go live in a cell while I drive cross country and see who has more fun.

The french presidential majority, you mean. Don't mistake the french with their politicians, or we could all think you're clones of G.W. Bush:)

The major problem of the 3-strike law is that it's a read-guard action that does essentially nothing (at worst) and completely ignores economic forces (at best).

30 years ago, in 1979, if I wanted to get a permanent copy of some content - say, a novel -, I would have to purchase a bunch of paper, some inks, find the appropriate tools (thank god, Xerox already existed), spend a couple hours preparing stuff, and would end with my copy of the novel. At the same time, a professional content copier - which I would call, say, a printer - would purchase paper at a discount compared to me, inks the same, have the tools ready for use, spend 1/1000th of the time I did per copy. Requiring the services of a professional content duplicator to make my copy of some content made economical sense.

Today, making a copy of some content involves about a milliwatt or so of electricity, a tool I already have, and 5s of my index or middle finger to do copy/paste. Using a professional content duplicator to make a copy of some content is an economically non-viable proposition, no matter how you turn around things. You cannot justify charging 15$ to make a DVD copy of a movie when I can make the same copy, at the same quality level, for one cent. And when I purchase your DVD, from my point of view, I am paying somebody 15$ for making a copy for me. That's good, if your DVD is a luxury item. But for a common economy good? Not working.

The profession of content duplicator is dead. Or dying. Like any profession that is no longer economically justified, it will go, like the hordes of people who slaved at hand looms to make cloths when Mr. Jacquart came with his automatic looms. They yelled, they ranted, they ran into the streets (hmmm, how many popular showings of movie industry people have we seen in the streets so far?). And in the end, they went, for no one would pay triple or worse prices for the same product.

The entire content industry is running in circles because, for good or worse, they all have hitched their cart to the profession of content duplicator. We still need people to create content (we call them artists). We still need businesses to find "good" content creators from the masses and advertise this content (we call them editors). We still need businesses to take the raw content, polish it, make sure it's well done (we call them producers). We even need business to deliver that content to us (we used to call them retail chains). What we no longer need is content duplicators. However, the whole content industry has decided (well, evolved) around the content duplicator. Why else are artists paid by the copy, if not because they use the content duplicator as the driver of their revenue. Everyone else in the industry does. Steve Jobs knew it when he was asked if he favored Blu-ray or HD-DVD: he said it didn't matter, because the idea of making expensive copies of content was already dying.

With that profession dying, they need to find out new methods of doing those services, and get paid. One segment of the content industry has already found it: the distributors. The guys who are delivering the content to the consumers are already there; they're called ISPs, and they charge people for the delivery of content - any content - and they're happy. They don't care if the content is subcription-based TV, iTunes songs, web pages, or BitTorrent P2P streams. They have found out the new business model of content delivery, and they're ready for the 21st century. The rest of the content profession still hasn't figured out, or, in the case of the old delivery channels will be dead. As usual when business models change, most of the old business go titsup and new business appear instead - only rarely will an existing business figure out it needs changing, figure out how it will change, and do it.

And when they have figured out how to live without the content duplicators, then HADOPI will become like all those laws that require you to keep your riding crop in hand when crossing another vehicle: something that's completely irrelevant.

I had a boss, who used to suggest with total seriousness that all politicians should be sent directly to jail after they serve their terms; without trial, without jury, straight from their table to their cell.

I just laughed at this as though it's a joke. But he never showed a joking manner with his opinion. It was often haunting, but the more he insisted on a poker face when saying the more I thought about it.

His claim is that all politicians are liars, and due to the gravity of their lies (in affecting the masses), their crimes have far reaching consequences and hence they should all go directly to jail after they serve for the rest of their lives.

I used to say, 'but we would have no politicians then', to which he said 'good'.

Funny though, he didn't seem to mind the man-behind-the-curtains, in the sense of the CEO of a locally publicly traded international business... who, he never voted for, nor even could identify by name or photo, having probably done more to influence his life than any politician has. For, the politicians he blames, were told what to do by Big Business.

It's only in light of this perspective that I would agree with my boss. Not on grounds of them lying, but more on the grounds they are supposed to serve the people, and not the companies. Since their fibs are a result of Big Business, and they choose Corporate spoils over the People.

I agree with my boss. They all should go directly to jail for not protecting the People.

I think you can. The encryption can be made so user-friendly that you may safely say that you weren't aware that the P2P application you have is using encryption. This is assuming encryption is wrong - you may just as well not care.

Encryption cannot solve this problem. For filesharing to work, peers who have data must somehow advertise this fact. It doesn't matter if that data is encrypted; you still know what it is and who has it.

There are only two things filesharers can do:

1. Try to restrict the people that they advertise to so that they are not caught by the authorities. Here, there are conflicting goals: In order to have lots of data available, you want the largest network possible. But in order to keep things secure, you need as few people in on it as possible. So the more pressure the copyright groups put on the networks, the more the equilibrium shifts towards smaller (and less valuable) networks.

2. Give data to intermediaries who pass it on. Either this is done with something like onion routing, or sites like rapidshare are used as the intermediaries. This relies on being able to trust the intermediaries to whom you are adjacent. There also must be some incentive for the intermediaries to pass on your data. In the case of onion routing, the incentive is that other people's traffic serves as "noise" which your own traffic can "hide" in. In the case of Rapidshare et al, it's simply cash, through a combination of paid memberships and advertising revenue.

I guess this means French file sharers will be moving to anonymous p2p programs like FreeNet, GnuNet, etc and darknets.
This is silly, bring it all out in the open, money can be made if the price is low and service good, for example allofmp3.com.
No rubbish about the artists will be cheated, they are badly cheated in the existing system:

Trent Reznor : "One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they'll sign anything'

Lets make a new system and pay the artists the lion share and let them own their music. Where an artists work can be got from multiple competing vendors. The artists and their fans is the more important thing. These fat middle men need to go on a slimfast diet and get the hell out the way. As for TV, Mark Pesce told the world that in 2005 http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html [mindjack.com]. Movies the same, plus we are still going to go to the cinema.

There are many ways this could work, but the world has changed and law makers legal world offers a tiny fraction of what this new world has to offer. Are they just too old fashioned? Still struggling with email let alone file sharing and hooking up the TV with the computer...

A physical DVD, including packaging, is close to $1.50. Now, you can copy a DVD, but can you produce the movie that is on that DVD? No, I didn't think so. Arguing that the only thing of value involved in DVD production is the physical medium is asinine.

People who don't agree with the principles in the Declaration and writings of the U.S. Founders should move to the E.U.

Yeah, because healthy disagreement is intolerable in a functional democracy...

What does that even mean, anyway? The "US Founders" didn't even agree among themselves, let alone present a unified platform for the rest of us to consider. They were not a borg collective. Many of the US founders advocated slavery, and almost all of them advocated gender inequality. Maybe you've heard of the Three-fifths Compromise [wikipedia.org]? Maybe not. Should people who disagree with those principles and writings move to Europe too?

Reminds me of Christians who cite Leviticus' writings to vilify homosexuality, while ignoring its prohibitions against other forms of sex, let alone the forbidden food and clothing.

So I doubt you're actually in favor of slavery, or gun duels, or any of the other archaic practices that some of the founders believed in. You're not really advocating strict adherence. Rather, what you're really advocating is adherence to *your* interpretation of their collective principles, or else to the status quo. Neither of those are, nor should they be, immune from review or criticism.

Think back, if you can remember the "good ol' times". The internet was an exchange of information and idea, it was full of intelligent, witty people who connected and congreated to think up dreams that formed ideas which spun projects...

The question is, which outcome will lead to a stable and prosperous society. Best evidence shows that humans decide whether they are prosperous based on their comparisons to their neighbors. The gap between the super wealthy and the very poor, therefor is the problem - especially as the middle and working classes continue to get poorer, while the very wealthy throw toga parties.

You did raise a false choice, based on some invalid conclusions. History has shown us that when the middle and lower classes prosper, so do the upper classes. That stands in stark contrast to the conditions that arise from an imbalance in the distribution of resources like the imbalance that exists today - hunger, homelessness - instability, violence. Check the news, we are solidly on our way.

I don't wish to live in a third world country, one like the state of things during the gilded age, with sweat shops and child labor. But that is where we are headed based on the evidence (high unemployment numbers, lower and decreasing median income numbers against inflation, low debt free homeownership, high personal debt rates, violent attacks on police and other random acts, etc.) of recent years - even before the economic problems of recent months (though that did accelerate already worsening problems).

The working and middle classes have been pretending to be prosperous, utilizing large amounts of credit card debt (that bubble is next to pop by the way), in addition to the obscene amount of housing debt they had been collecting. The reality is, they couldn't, and still can't afford to live that kind of life. The funny thing about credit - it's a loan, and it costs money. People were naive to believe that a loan or a credit card made them more wealthy.

More of the same is more of a shift in wealth to the already wealthy while the rest of us get poorer, and lose out homes (again, the evidence is clear here). The fix is easy enough, we just need to will to do it. Spread the wealth around (the opposite of what is happening now) through fairer compensation laws - no need for handouts. And we even have history to show us how well that works - take a look at the New Deal (a deal put in place to stave off socialism, not to encourage it - gotta get with the history!). More people prosper in that situation - including the very wealthy.

Also, I couldn't care less about their perceived money problems, just to express my actual anger at these people and their greedy entitlement mentalities.;-P

Also, also, I appreciate the moderate tone you took with your comments. We could use more of that. The yelling is not productive.:-)

how does one ensure that the creators (and their owners) make enough to offset the cost of making the first copy?

First, don't talk about copy. Content business will have to stop being about copies to survive in a world of ubiquitous cheap copying. Aside, that's the thoughie: right now, everybody in the content industry has its cart hitched on the per-copy model.

Each author gets paid by the (sold) copy. However, if you look at the copyright legislation, you'll see that's not a feature. There's nothing in law that dictates that an author must be paid by the copy. It's just that they (the authors) are used to that model. Heck, they even have evolved complex models to account for the correct number of copies for their payments - and if you dare miscount, why, they'll sue you. But there's no base law that requires authors to be paid so, it's just that it's "how it's been always done".

Do I have a solution? No. If I did, I would probably have started a content business of the 21st century. Someone will figure out a good model. Meanwhile, everybody tries to animate the zombie of the old model so they can get some useful work out of it. Will it cause a lot of people to lose their jobs? Probably - that's how every major technical progress did: previous business dies, new business with lower overhead rises instead. You get more jobs when you invent something that no one consumed before, but that's not the case here.

Some countries are readying themselves for the new models. I read someone speaking about China and the music business there. He said that artists based their living on performances, tours, private concerts, whatever. No one expected much money to come from recordings - every recording is going to be duplicated and distributed at close to zero cost, so they don't try to compete with the zero-cost non-professional duplication; they just make money otherwise. Your music recordings are treated as advertising. And that's they country we're trying to strangle with ACTA and the like, and force to move out from the 21st century business era back to the 19th century one under the various threats of commercial sanctions "if you don't copy our obsolete and unviable US models".